Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  I had never heard anything like this from her before. It shocked me and terrified me. It was as though she had had a stroke of some bizarre kind, and the strangeness of her face supported that thought. The pressure was also bizarre, because soon we would have to gather around that table with the jury and the chief of the festival and have solemn discussions and arguments and rancorous voting. I tried to turn it into a joke, a spontaneous piece of performance art. “This is your response to the North Korean film, isn’t it? The North Korean film has burrowed into your breast, your left-wing breast, your Red breast.” I knew the movie had affected her profoundly, and had already disturbed many sleeping Marxist dogs which never leave their French intellectual kennels. But she screamed at me, and moaned, and I was terrified that the jury would become a criminal jury and they would convict us and we would never be allowed to leave the czarist villa. No one came to monitor us, though. We had heard many shrieks and shouts and arguments and morbid moanings throughout the course of the evening before, then the night, then this Sunday morning, the Sunday of the palmarès. A passionate and creative group of cineastes.

  And so the essay. It was really a letter to me, a confession she could make in no other way, published in the Paris magazine Sartre, though I had begged her not to. It was too intimate, I said. But she said, “Philosophy is intimate, the most intimate act of thinking.” And so: “The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion,” an essay by Célestine Arosteguy. Of course, those of us on the jury of that year would hear the resonance. The North Korean film was called The Judicious Use of Insects, and in her essay Célestine confesses that the movie triggered the “stroke”—of luck?—but reveals that the breast disconnect, the insect connection, had been building for years and so terrified her that she couldn’t speak of it to anyone, not me, not her beloved physician. She describes the scene of the ultimate vote for the Palm. The president had asked the jury for the titles of all their proposed candidates for the Palm to be handwritten on a piece of festival paper—complete with golden embossed palm symbol—and passed to him. When he came across her paper, upon which she had written the title of the North Korean film, he took his cigar lighter out of his pocket and set fire to it, tossing it into the ashtray which he himself had brought every day to our meeting room in the Palais des Festivals and now brought to the villa in defiance of the non-smoking regulations. “I was not allowed to bring my nine-millimeter pistol,” he said, with his characteristic sarcasm-dripping smile, “so this will have to do.” The festival’s artistic delegate, who was there to certify the legitimacy of the voting procedure, was horrified at this barbarity and gently admonished the jury president. But he would not be cowed. “If this thing wins the vote for the Palm, or in fact for anything at all, I shall resign as president and I’ll let everyone know why.” And his look to Célestine was hideous, mocking, malicious, and misogynistic. I was there too, of course. I did not intend to vote for the North Korean film, but I had not yet revealed my own choice.

  There was on our jury an aged, angry, exiled North Korean director, Bak Myun Mok, who was obviously an enemy of the director of the North Korean film in competition. He was prepared to do anything to prevent his entrenched countryman from winning a prize, and so he was campaigning—none too subtly—against him. He turned specifically to me and spread his hands in helpless despair. His translator, Yolanda, was a shy young Spanish woman with short, straight black hair that suggested she was trying to look Korean. Even the way she held her mouth was somehow Korean. Yolanda was not comfortable with what he was saying. “You are a philosopher,” she said to me, beginning her translation, but then paused and looked at him apprehensively, almost begging him to say something other than what he was actually saying. In response to this insolence, the director picked up a pencil—we had all been provided with pencils and pads of paper, so charmingly retro—and prodded her viciously, twice, in her delicate, exposed clavicle. Though there was an eraser in the end of the pencil, it left an angry red mark almost immediately.

  The translator turned back to me with wide apologetic eyes and continued. “You are a philosopher,” she said, “and that meat dog of a wife of yours is also a philosopher. Both of you professional philosophers, whatever that means. Can you not explain to the bitch that the movie, even the title, The Judicious Use of Insects, is not philosophy, and not art, but politics of the worst, most repressive kind. And to give this wretched, sinister movie any prize would be to shackle the art of cinema to the wall of political expediency.”

  “‘Meat dog of a wife’?” I said to Yolanda. “He really said that? And ‘the bitch’?”

  “Under his breath, yes, he said those things.” Yolanda’s voice shook with distress, and her eyes became shiny with tears. “I made sure that I did not misunderstand him. I asked him to reconsider what he was saying. And he said those words again, no longer under his breath.” Then, as a tremulous pedagogical afterthought—Yolanda was trying to acquire a French teaching certificate—she added, “In Korea, meat dogs are called nureongi or hwangu, meaning ‘yellow dog.’ You don’t let them into your house. ‘Bitch’ is girl dog.”

  He was not small, Bak Myun Mok, but he was arrogant and therefore slow and unprepared for my attack. Because we were not allowed to bring cameras and cell phones to our retreat, there are no photographs or videos of the expression of my rage, though the aftermath—Bak’s broken cheekbone, his black eyes, his shredded lower lip—was duly recorded by the police photographer summoned to the villa. Through all of this, Célestine was profoundly absent and vacant-eyed, increasingly anesthetized by her own spiraling reactions to The Judicious Use of Insects. I won’t go into the overall delicious scandal, which is well documented on the internet. Suffice it to say that the voting procedure was quite irregular, the palmarès was a satisfactory pandemonium, and the North Korean film won a Special Jury Prize—for “artistic subversion and visual elegance”—in consolation. Dragan, the president, voted against this, though he had clapped his hands in delight as Bak and I rolled around on the floor, exclaiming in several languages that this was real cinema and unsuccessfully encouraging the rest of the jury to join in. Bak also voted against the prize, his vote conveyed from a dentist’s office in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he was having emergency treatment on an upper-left bicuspid which I had loosened when I smashed his face into the replica Winter Palace Dutch tiles of the ballroom floor. When I grabbed his hair and dragged his head towards the solid ebony voting-table leg, the action had produced a satisfying smear of saliva, blood, and mucus on the tiles, mostly from that rocking tooth splitting the gum it was embedded in.

  Bak later swore that he had been mistranslated and that he had a deep respect for all women, particularly intellectual women like Célestine, and was incapable of even thinking of words like that in relation to her. Yolanda later came to us in Paris, technically as a witness in the assault investigation proceeding against me, but emotionally to sob and whine about the loss of her festival job and the general degrading of her standing in the community of translators. She did ultimately end up in bed with me and Célestine, and was very sweetly needy and desperate sexually, which of course was a delight to me, and would normally have been to Célestine, but she was still benumbed. It was only when I forced Yolanda to describe our sex play in real time in the most obscene way in both Spanish and Korean that Célestine was somehow resuscitated.

  I had entered Yolanda from the rear—not anally, you understand; she resisted that—and Célestine had her back up against mine. As she heard the breathy, ragged, dirty phrases coming from deep within Yolanda and mounting in intensity, she turned until her belly was against my back, reached across my head, and grabbed Yolanda by the chin and the hair. She rotated Yolanda’s head until the shocked translator had to twist towards me to avoid having her neck snapped, and then, face to face now, Célestine said, “And the meaning of the title, then? You can explain it to us and reveal the sinister malignancy it encodes according to Bak Myun Mok? I saw you talking to
him in the halls of the Festival Palace. You were flirting with him. He must have confided in you.” At first Yolanda was understandably confused, firstly because Célestine spoke to her in her very imperfect Spanish, and then not least because she had seemed to be on the verge of a monumental orgasm, one which had a Moorish flavor somehow, or perhaps that was just my delusion, and now had twisted me out of her, leaving her to pump frantically against my right knee, which had been aching in its chronically unpredictable way, so that I had to shift her pudendum to my left knee.

  Most of this melodrama is, as I have said, embodied in the famous essay, famous for the personal events that it revealed as much as for its radical, some say unhinged, approach to consumerist philosophy. What Yolanda said in our bed about the North Korean film did not satisfy Célestine. Bak Myun Mok’s interpretation fell along traditional political lines: staggering under the burden of a crushing drought, the poor villagers in the film—who lived in a hermetically sealed fantasy of a timeless proto-Korean village—were forced by their rulers to supplement their protein-poor diets with insects, which were viewed as noxious and disgusting by the filmmakers, although of course considered legitimate delicacies elsewhere in the world. (Even in modern South Korea, beondegi, steamed or boiled silkworm pupae, looking unashamedly segmented and insect-like, are a popular street snack food.) The title word judicious was used with irony, in the sense of “desperate,” “last-gasp.” But in the stunning and brilliant new world of North Korean Juche Idea, or neo-Stalinist self-reliance, one would not have to resort to insects to feed one’s children, and this was exemplified in the most didactic, programmatic way by the revolt of the peasants against their village elders, who were all members of a violent, repressive, shamanistic caste that promoted insect-eating as a religious imperative. Did not Célestine see the crude propaganda involved? Was she seduced so totally by the retro visual style of the movie, so strangely in color and camera movement like a lush Douglas Sirk Hollywood melodrama of the 1950s?

  What Célestine did see was a work created expressly for her by, unaccountably, a North Korean movie director whom she had never heard of and who probably, given the geo-fencing of the country, had never heard of her. How was this possible? Of course, she recognized the inevitable theory that this was a solipsist reverie, but in the spirit of inner drama it didn’t matter if it was: it had meaning for her, and gave her a philosophical project. Korean cinema, particularly North Korean, became an obsession for Célestine, but of course, given its unorthodox trajectory, it did not require study of Korean history or even the actual watching of Korean films. No. It required research of the subversive, subterranean kind, and so I came home one evening, for example, to find our apartment full of acolytes of Simon Sheen, also known as Shin Sang-ok. Shin was most famous for having been kidnapped in Hong Kong, along with his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee, by the future dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il. Kim was a movie fanatic who understood the propaganda value of film, and also knew movie charisma when he saw it. And he didn’t see it in North Korea, so he kidnapped it. (The evening proved to be dismal and awkward, with no narrative to speak of, though Célestine was enraptured by the Sheenians’ somewhat confused presence.)

  Célestine convinced herself that the director of Judicious was not Korean at all, but was in fact a kidnapped French director who knew her very well and was signaling her through his film. Bak had claimed that Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un himself was the movie’s producer, following the principles set out in his father’s book On the Art of Cinema, and so, given that the passion for movies still flourished in Pyongyang in tandem with neo-Stalinist ruthlessness under the guise of the Juche Idea, why would they not kidnap the best appropriate director? Why would they not kidnap Romme Vertegaal?

  SO. “WE MUST DESTROY the insect religion,” she said.

  “Tina, are you really awake? Are you dreaming? Do you know what you’re saying?”

  [“Tina?” said Naomi.]

  [“From Célestine. And we both loved Tina Turner, the American singer.”]

  [“Okay. So, Tina.”]

  “He would be forty-two now,” she said.

  “Who would?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  “Romme,” she said. “He was almost exactly twenty years younger than me.”

  You need to know that while there was always Aristide, there were also what we called lacunae, intervals when we needed to be apart. And inevitably filling those lacunae for Célestine was Romme, a brilliant young and radical filmmaker who left his Sciences Po studies to communicate his politics through the art of cinema. Strange politics, and strange cinema: an obsession with Ike Eisenhower, China, the 1950s in America, and the films of Douglas Sirk. Romme Vertegaal was a student of Célestine’s, and of course her lacunate lover as well. He was Dutch born and ridiculously tall, and he stressed to Célestine right from the very beginning that, perhaps in keeping with his extreme height, his eye was always on oblivion. “Blessed, blessed oblivion,” the original Beats would have tattooed on their shoulders, and Romme had those words tattooed on his heart. It was clear that he intended to disappear, to “obliviate,” and eventually he did, leaving Célestine quite devastated. We had just reconnected, filling our latest lacuna with ourselves, and the substance of our rekindled talks was this newly lost love of hers, and the unexpected pain it caused her hurt me too, because I thought she would never recover from it, and therefore any love between us would be experienced in the shadow of this holy, much greater, lost love. Romme was a spectacular young man even beyond his absurd, almost surreal height. Perhaps you have encountered some of his works on YouTube. They are stunning.

  His friends were certain that he committed suicide in some fiendishly clever way that involved the absolute dissolution, possibly by automotive chemicals, of his body, and that was also the tentative official police version of his disappearance. Célestine, however, was sure he went to China and disappeared into the vastness of that country, despite his height. And then came Judicious, and Célestine knew that he had ended up in North Korea, making propaganda films for Kim Jong Il, and then real movies for his possibly more volatile successor, the boy-king Kim Jong Un, movies which had certain messages directed at her, Célestine, Romme’s eternal and transnational love.

  And so, that night when Célestine shook me awake to tell me that we must destroy the insect religion, I knew we were in trouble. I just didn’t know what shape that trouble would take. Perhaps in the cards was an approach to whatever clandestine North Korean representatives in Paris we could find with the suggestion of a special visit to their homeland from two famous French philosophers, with an emphasis on the philosophy of cinema. Once there, Célestine would try to contact Romme Vertegaal, who worked under the pseudonym Jo Woon Gyu (the listed director of Judicious), and would elope with him, or rather would marry him under the auspices of Supreme Leader Kim, auspiciously replicating the forced marriage of Simon Sheen to his actress ex-wife after they were both kidnapped, and symbolizing the divine fusion of political philosophy and cinema in the Workers’ Paradise of the North. Could Célestine really think in these terms? Profound emotion lay beneath all her thinking, but it never stopped her from being crystalline in her logic, rigorous in her doctrine. Everything connected with Romme, on the other hand, was soaked through with girlish lunacy, and was very disturbing and destabilizing to me and to us.

  But even given all the time I spent living in her head and in her body, I never could have anticipated Célestine’s actual Korean strategy.

  WE DRIVE AN ELECTRIC Smart Fortwo in Paris. I took Célestine to a North Korean restaurant where she was to meet some mysterious collaborators on her Romme Vertegaal project; it was famous for its startling military-theme design featuring the graphics and colors of totalitarian kitsch. She asked me to leave her there; she would call me when she was finished. I became worried that she was getting into a potentially dangerous situation. I fantasized that she herself would be kidnapped and spirited off to Pyongyang. That she
didn’t want me involved troubled me even more: it meant she was communing with Romme, almost the only time that she could not also commune with me, and of course that was distressing. I confess that I parked our car some streets over and lingered across the street from the restaurant.

  As I stood there smoking, sheltering in the entrance to a carpet shop, I mused, oddly enough, on the fact that even in his youth, Romme had worn hearing aids—originally Phonaks, but when last seen, Siemens—as a result of a childhood disease. When I finally accepted that I needed them myself, I thought of Romme’s claim that they were tuned to the music of the spheres, and then, more seriously and mundanely, to certain satellite frequencies. He was never ashamed of or reticent about his hearing disability; he was more likely to be boastful and aggressive about it—he politicized it, like everything else—and so it became a cause. After he had worked you over in a café, you felt as though you ought to at least pierce your eardrums with a fork tine in solidarity with him, and also to experience firsthand the divine creation of Swiss and German audio technology. In a kind of audio-homage to him, I went to his own audiologist when it came my time to be fitted. By then, digital technology had enhanced the sophistication of these devices beyond science fiction to the point that they could be linked to cell phones, satellite GPS, and many other communications devices. It was commonplace to call them hearing instruments, an appellation with empowering artistic overtones, as opposed to hearing aids, a term unfailingly evocative of aging and infirmity. My own Siemens instruments featured Bluetooth, six separate programs tailored for different hearing environments, rocker switches for program shifting and volume control, and a wireless controller that looked like a garage door opener. Mme Jungebluth cryptically assured me that she numbered several international intelligence agents among her clientele, none of whom was hearing impaired.